Packet networks have evolved to become a primary vehicle for delivering real-time and interactive multimedia and streaming media services. These different media services may be established with different types of communication clients, which have different communication capabilities. These capabilities will be referred to as media capabilities, and may relate to supported data rates, encryption techniques, decoding and encoding (codec) techniques, or other session-related characteristics. To date, there are various protocols used for allowing communication clients to exchange their respective media capabilities and select a media capability from the available media capabilities to use in a communication session established between the communication clients. As such, communication clients participating in a communication session may negotiate with one another to select the media capabilities for the communication session. Thus, the ultimate decision on which media capabilities are selected resides with the communication clients participating in the communication session.
Since the communication clients typically are not aware of service level agreements between a subscriber and a service provider or current network conditions, the communication clients are not well positioned to render decisions regarding media selection that meet the objectives and requirements of the service providers, let alone to take into consideration network conditions. Further, many communication clients may be able to use different types of services provided by different service providers. As such, a communication client may simultaneously receive service from different service providers, yet the service providers may not be aware of each other or their relative service agreements with the subscriber. When different media capabilities are available, it would be beneficial to negotiate the selection of media capabilities based on an overall perspective, which is currently unavailable.
Accordingly, there is a need for a more sophisticated negotiation system for selecting media capabilities for communication clients, wherein the selection process occurs in light of subscriber and service provider service agreements, network conditions, or other factors bearing on the efficient allocation of network resources and communication client capabilities.